I discovered dublog today, much to my work ethic's chagrin. Dublog is a visual arts and culture weblog; many of todays links were culled from it's posts.

While perusing the contents of Virtual Dali the following excerpt from his biography intrigued me:

"To bring up images from his subconscious mind, Dal� began to induce hallucinatory states in himself by a process he described as 'paranoiac critical.' Once Dal� hit on this method, his painting style matured with extraordinary rapidity, and from 1929 to 1937 he produced the paintings that made him the world's best-known Surrealist artist."

Have you ever "found" images hidden in the clouds? Seen faces and flames in the veins of a marble fireplace? Are you able to see past what something "is" in order to discover what it "could be" in relation to it's form, colour and visual complexity? If so, then you too are harnessing the paranoiac critical method. Dali described it as a form of self-induced psychosis, a method through which the user can harvest their own subconscious for artistic fodder.

A perfect example of this can be seen in his piece, Slave Market with the Apparition of the Invisible Bust of Voltaire. Inspiration for this painting is said to have come from the pair of Catholic nuns "seen" by Dali, hidden within Jean-Antoine Houdon's Bust of Voltaire. Nuns hidden in the folds of an atheist's bust!

Dali later incorporated what he called the Oniric-Critical method into his inspiration repertoire. This method was based off the idea that the artist could freeze the images and ideas from their dreams through art for later analysis. While both of these methods may seem somewhat trivial, it should be noted that surrealist artists relied mainly on automatism before Dali revolutionized the genre.


As a printmaker himself, my father would appreciate this page of printmaking techniques. Not only does this site provide a detailed description of each technique, but high-res examples are also provided. Each example image is an image map that can be clicked anywhere for a zoomed in view. Now the only question left to ask is which technique Istv�n Orosz used to create this gem.


Elegant Kinetic sculptures.

Functional machines as sculptures.

Algorithmic Art: Software as Genotype.

Beautifully eerie marionettes and the studio where they were born.

The 800x600 Project. 64 pictures. 1 subject.

Detailed psilocybin visions.

What's n3xt?

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